The same folks that brought you airport charging stations, are now installing 2,000 displays at retailers to help demystify HD. According to a study by Best Buy, 89% of Americans are confused about HD in some way or another and given that all broadcasts are shifting to HD in 2009, that’s a lot of confusion to address. According to a story in Brandweek:

The displays show a number of Samsung home theater components and explain HDTVs, Blu-ray players, home theater receivers and speaker systems. “Samsung hopes to help consumers immediately recognize, right at the point of purchase, the true benefits of HD for their home, while providing consumers a number of options and total solutions to make HD a part of their lives,” said Tim Baxter, evp-sales and marketing at Samsung Electronics, Ridgefield Park, N.J.

Samsung’s efforts to make HD easy to understand provides a genuine service to many consumers. That said, it will be interesting to see if consumers respond well to this service since some will undoubtedly be skeptical of the information presuming that it will have a natural bias toward Samsung products. Had Samsung partnered with a credible third-party information source like cNet, then this would be a non-issue and consumers would truly thanks Samsung for the service. Nonetheless, with a couple of thousand kiosks out there, Samsung displays a huge commitment to Marketing as Service.

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